From Treasury Masterminds
Treasury Masterminds Founder/Board Member, Patrick Kunz, joined Treasury 360 Nordic 2026 on Thursday in Gothenburg, and the format pretty much forces you into a reality every treasurer recognizes: you can’t attend everything, so you pick your battles and hope you chose wisely.
The agenda wasn’t built around one big headline theme. Instead, it was a mix of parallel sessions covering what treasury is currently wrestling with in real life. Slightly messy, but honestly more realistic than a perfectly structured conference narrative.
Real-time treasury is creeping into reality
Across multiple sessions, the idea of real-time treasury kept popping up.
Not in the overhyped vendor sense, but in practical discussions:
- Moving away from static daily reporting
- Increasing frequency of cash visibility
- Shortening decision cycles
The gap between “we want real-time insight” and “we still rely on yesterday’s data” is still very real. Most companies are somewhere awkwardly in between, pretending they’re further along than they actually are.
AI is finally being treated like a tool, not a miracle
AI showed up everywhere, as expected. But the tone has shifted.
Instead of vague promises, the conversations focused on:
- Forecasting improvements
- Automating repetitive processes
- Supporting decisions rather than replacing them
In other words, AI is becoming… boring. Which is exactly what you want if it’s actually going to work.
Comment from James Kelly, Treasury Masterminds Board Member
We are now regularly seeing that access to AI tools is near universal. All 17 of the attendees at our workshop had access to a corporate AI tool – Most Copilot, but several people had access to Gemini, and some had access to multiple.
But, the stories of successful generative AI implementation at scale are just emerging from corporates. Advanced policy bots are becoming commonplace, and some sessions mentioned including AI in file transformation. As Patrick said, we’re moving to a future where sessions will no longer be titled AI but will be cash management or FX with AI as a meaningful part of the transformation.
Digital assets: less hype, more “maybe useful”
Sessions around stablecoins and digital assets felt noticeably more grounded than a year ago.
The focus was on:
- Cross-border payment efficiency
- Liquidity accessibility
- Practical integration challenges
No one is throwing their banking setup out the window tomorrow, but the tone has shifted from curiosity to cautious experimentation.
James: The stat that stuck with me was from Citi, which said that 60% of their major corporates were using stablecoins, which is enormous growth versus even a couple of years ago. Many of these will be for transfers between Citi and JPM branches, but even so, it’s a very big shift.
The treasury tech stack is a growing problem
Another recurring theme: technology fragmentation.
Topics circled:
- TMS landscapes
- Integration with ERPs and banks
- Data flows and connectivity
The uncomfortable truth is that many treasury setups have grown organically into something… let’s call it “creative.” Lots of tools, limited cohesion.
Everyone wants automation, but fewer people want to deal with the plumbing required to make it actually work.
James: And that risk increases with AI if the right governance and process isn’t put around the process. If everyone experiments and uses their own tools, it creates a spaghetti to manage. Having a joined-up team and organisation approach makes a big difference.
Risk management is expanding beyond finance
Risk sessions didn’t stay neatly within FX or interest rates anymore.
They touched on:
- Geopolitical exposure
- Operational risks
- Broader financial resilience
Treasury is increasingly pulled into strategic discussions, whether the team is ready for it or not.
Digitalisation is still the foundation (yes, still)
If you strip everything down, most sessions still came back to the same basics:
- Data quality
- Process standardisation
- Automation
- Connectivity
Not new. Not exciting. Still, the thing that determines whether anything else works.
The format: controlled chaos
The Thursday setup is a mix of:
- Parallel sessions
- Short formats
- Heavy networking in between
It’s not polished, but it works. You build your own agenda on the fly, and half the value comes from conversations outside the sessions anyway.
Final takeaway
Thursday wasn’t about one breakthrough idea. It was about direction.
- AI is becoming usable
- Digital assets are becoming testable
- Tech stacks are becoming unavoidable
- Treasury’s role is becoming broader
And underneath all of that:
Data and connectivity are still the bottleneck.
Everything else just depends on how well you fix that.
Also Read
- EACT Summit 2026 – Our Takeaways (from the inside)
- PSD3 Is Coming, But the Real Impact Starts Earlier Than You Think
- Payments Are Breaking (Again): Why Fraud, Multi-Rail Complexity and Regulation Are Redefining Treasury
- Stablecoins and Central Banks: A New Regulatory Chess Game
- Oil Price Shocks: The Treasury Domino Effect
- Sustaining Financial Clarity as Organisations Grow
- Webinar Recap: Cash Flow Forecasting on Trial
- Should Cyber Risk (and Insurance) Be on the Treasurer’s Agenda?
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